A short story

About Two People, and Two Advice They Gave

In 2017 October, the second to last semester I’m at NYU financial engineering, I was kindly offered a position working on sell side rates trading analytics.

In 2017 October, shortly before I got this offer (with another offer on hand), I went on a trip to Chicago organizing a conference, where I met Brain Peterson at dinner, who at that time was a head of quantitative trading at DV. I explained my situation to him, and asked, “I want to be a trader, will starting my career like this destroy it?”. He answered, with many more great and brilliant details but I will summarize to, “you know what will destroy your career? Starting on a trader position with no clue right after college! … The process of selecting a trading strategy is not like great accuracy, good, go to production! I spend most of my time trying to prove my models are wrong first, and you know how many failed? More than 90%! If you want to be a good trader (here we are talking about quant specifically), start from the analytics, and always try to prove yourself wrong".

In 2018 April, two months after I joined the above mentioned team, I went to Princeton to organize the same conference again, where I met Ryan Sheftel, again. The first time was I acted as a contact person to arrange his talk at NYU Tandon. After the event, I talked to him about the April conference, and he asked me what would I like to hear about for the April talk. Knowing his superior fixed income quant specialty, I said, how about something like affine term structure. He laughed and then said, “that would be too complicated, I will think of another one”. This lead me to hear the best talk on personal development ever in April. He talked about his own experience, of moving from entry level to MD, then to starting his own business. He said, "Everyone here is so young, and you should go take **calculated risk** because you can fail again and again. Don't wait for when you are ready, if you are not ready now, sure you won't be when you settled down, married, and have kids to look after".

I will expand my thoughts on the two advice and why the timeline is important in the random comments section in another day.